Autorouting Multipin connectors (headers)

Cannot seem to find a topic that covers this, so I created a new one…
I am using v5.1.4

When using a multi-pin connector (header), Is there any way to allow an auto-router to choose which pins to connect to, based on the best routing options?

I did discover (recently) that using the tilde (~) as the Pin names for two-Pin devices seems to trigger a behavior that results in an “either / or” , “connect to nearest” routing. Does that behavior extend to devices with more than 2 pins? This seems to be a very useful function to have, if it does not already exist!

No, and AFAIK ~ isn’t meant for that with 2-pin devices, either.

https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1950

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Thanks for the comment, eelik.

That is interesting…the ~ did appear to work but I was only focussed on a single component so perhaps the routing changed (i.e., flipped) for an unrelated reason.

I looked at the Gitlab URL you provided…it appears that there is no functionality like this (yet?) in KiCad. I am not a PCB design guru----Can anybody suggest a relatively efficient way to get to the same destination? I can imagine replacing the multi-pin header with single connection points (e.g., a spade connector), laboriously pushing them around and iterating with an auto-router to achieve better routing. I would like to use the “auto placement” function to speed things up after moving the connection point and ‘anchoring’ it, but the LOCK function seems to be ignored by KiCad’s auto placement. Today, I posted another question about that problem (and a related Auto placement behavior) on the Forum as well.
VW

There are some plugings around that focus on this feature, @devbisme’s WireIt and @MitjaN SwapPins come to my mind at the moment. Probably @HiGreg 's KiCommand too, because that plugin can do almost anything :slight_smile:

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